


A Different Kind of Battle

by hellkitty



Category: RoboCop (2014), RoboCop - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-14
Updated: 2014-03-14
Packaged: 2018-01-15 17:24:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1313110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt was 'revision', in the form of a 'deleted scene'. Spoilers, of course. And some headcanon because that's how I roll.  Rating is for language: like most special ops guys I know, I imagine Mattox cusses like a beast.</p>
<p>And I will sheepishly yell my love of Rick Mattox forever though I'm not really sure what that says about me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Different Kind of Battle

“Damn.” Mattox flung the scorched exosuit down against the armory breakdown table. That stupid fucking machine. Fifty-three. He’d taken out fifty-three of Mattox’s store of EM-208s.

That pissed him off more than the tasing—his guys, knocked out, shot down, shown up. He could handle a little pain. Didn’t get anywhere in life without a little pain.

“Eloquent as always,” Raymond Sellars, following him in, that casual, soft, civilian stride he had.

Great, just what Mattox wanted to deal with right now. He wasn’t the type to suck up to the boss, especially not now. “It’s fucking bullshit, Sellars.”

“I thought it went well.” Sellars folded his arms over his chest, the leather of his lambskin jacket in soft folds, crossing over to examine the charred exosuit. Alex had shorted it out with the taser, and Mattox had had to pry his way out of it. Which he’d resented. As he did everything. Rick Mattox: tiny angry ball of resentment against the world. 

Sellars was used to this: you want a good team, you have to deal with the fact that the best always have some emotional…quirks that needed managing: Mattox's hostility, Norton's squeamish conscience. That’s why they called it ‘Management’. And Mattox, prickly as he was, was the best in the business. And even better? He never gave a damn about renegotiations. Every contract he’d signed, he’d simply looked over and shrugged and said ‘yeah’. No demanding more benefits or a higher salary or vacation time. And looking at him, honestly, it was hard to imagine Rick Mattox on vacation: on a beach in Aruba holding a tropical drink? The idea threatened to push a laugh through Sellars’s usual grin.

“Well. Bull-fucking-shit.”

“Rick.” Because the first name always got attention. “Look, you did your best--.”

“Oh, don’t give me that fucking loser second place ‘it’s how you play the game’ shit.” The hard, grey eyes looked up at him from the suit he was carefully dismantling. Mattox knew his equipment, had taught himself everything there was to know about every weapon, every droid he had.

“No, no. Not what I meant. I wanted—I needed—to know if he could handle himself. If I left the testing up to Dennett?”

A scoff, a step in the direction Sellars wanted him in. “You left testing up to Norton and we’d be watching Tin Man there pick flowers and read to fucking children.”

Not quite true: he’d get a pile of studies on reflex time, disconnected tests that said nothing about real-world environment. But he took it, because Mattox wanted it. “Exactly. I needed someone to put him in some real shit, with real stakes. I needed you, Rick.”

Bruised egos were the easiest to heal. In fact, in Sellars’s experience, bruised egos were vulnerable egos. He could see it on Mattox’s face. Everyone liked being told they were the best.

“If I’d had better weapons. Fifty-cals for the EMs.” Mattox was re-running it in his head. His EMs had done exactly what he'd told them to, had behaved perfectly. It was a firepower issue, not a tactical one. 

“Sure, sure,” Sellars conceded. “You had some constraints. We had to give him a chance to live through the test, Rick.” Two point six billion dollars in development: you bet he’d put limitations on what Mattox could take out there.

He could almost feel Mattox’s anger evaporating. But Mattox was a fan of his kind of overkill and Sellars was a believer in his own. “Rick. Listen. He’s just a shock troop. He’s a gimmick. We get him in the door, in Detroit, he busts a few baddies—cop stuff, not the stuff you do—and you know what happens when the Dreyfus Amendment gets overturned?” A beat. “I’ll give you a hint. We aren’t making more of him.”

“Really.” Trying to sound cynical, and not quite managing.

“Really. My word, Mattox. He’s media cannon fodder. And when we win—and we will, because of you, because of your insistence we don’t let a mediocre product out of here—the US is open territory. You’ll be…so in demand we’ll have to clone you.” Well, not really, and Mattox knew it. Jesus, he couldn’t imagine dealing with multiple Mattoxes. One was more than enough.

But Mattox liked the idea: he could see it in the way the eyes lit up, the mouth pulled out of its scowl like a plane pulling out of a death dive. Sellars didn’t have his personnel file memorized but his type was easy enough to figure: small guy, from a big, working class family, probably called a ‘runt’, had the shit beaten out of him by his own dad, his own brothers. The kind of tough you get from self-preservation that hides a baseline massive wound of insecurity. Everyone thought Sellars was brilliant with trends, with the future. He wasn’t. He was good at reading the past, knowing what people did and why they did it and how to make them do it more.

One more push. “And, Rick. Couldn’t have done it without you.” He gave that boyish headtilt, the one that said ‘hey, come on, we’re on the same side here’.

It was like tipping a ball into the net: he knew Mattox was his. Mattox did his job because he got off on the power, the control: Sellars wasn’t that different. Only he wasn’t a bullets and sweat man. Unsubtle, blunt instruments. Hell, even Norton’s fine scalpels and neuroimplants were clumsy things compared to this: only words, only air, winning a man’s mind and loyalty, controlling him, without even laying a finger on him.

"I want to be there," Mattox said, "When we don't need it and we pull the fucking plug. I want to watch."

He must have been a bloodthirsty little kid: probably pulled wings off flies, Sellars thought.  "Know what? I'll even let you do it. I mean, I think you've earned that right."

"Damn right I have," Mattox growled, hand rubbing over his neck, where Sellars could spot the red raised irritation of a burn, from the taser's conductance through the exosuit.  "It's mine." 

Sellars nodded, gracious. There was no need to argue when you've already won, after all.


End file.
